Multi-faceted, solo-guitarist Kaki King is coming to the Soka University Performing Arts Center for the Acoustic Strings Festival on Saturday, Jan. 20.

Having played with artists including the Foo Fighters and Timbaland, King’s 20-year music career has fluctuated genres. With a wide variety of playing styles, King’s performances are uniquely applied to each audience and show, picking out the set list as she “feels the audience,” she said.

“I have a very long history with the instrument,” King said. “I think performance, practicing and playing are only times when my brain switches off into a different mode.”

King will be sharing the stage with Germán López, timple and guitar, Bettman & Halpin, fiddle and guitar, and Diego Figueiredo, guitar. The festival starts at 3 p.m. with the last performance, a group jam, at 10 p.m.

Raised in Atlanta, King first picked up the guitar at four years old and her relationship with the instrument grew naturally.

“I don’t think it’s a passion for me, just an intersection of the thing that I love and I’m good at,” King said.

As of late, King primarily plays finger-style guitar, with mainly right-hand based finger-picking changing the tune, opposed to left-hand based finger-picking. Her original songs, some with vocals and many without, could be compared to the musical tastes of Elliott Smith, she said.

Performing songs written throughout her career, King said a few of her expected songs to play at the Acoustic Strings Festival are “Fences,” played on a 12-string guitar; “Playing with Pink Noise,” a percussive song coinciding with string action; and “Cargo Cult,” more of a moody song, she said.

“I’m into different types of guitars, not necessarily straying too far from the norm, but I really enjoy different formats of different instruments,” King said.

King’s guitar style ranges from tidy and complicated solo-acoustics to “almost-emo” rock, where at the end of the night she’s throwing around beer with audiences and jumping up and down, she said.

Based in Brooklyn, New York, King said she is excited to come out to California and perform at Soka University.

“When I play solo — this is something I’ve been doing for such a long time — I usually like to feel out the audience,” King said. “It’s the day of the women’s march in LA, so I’ll go to that and then drive down to the show, see how that felt and see how the audience feels.”

With a standard set of nearly 40 songs that she can play off the top of her head, King said it varies on how much she will sing or talk at each performance.

“There are so many fantastic musicians that night, I want to give the audience something a little bit different,” King said. “It’s hopeful for me to not plan too far ahead.”

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